The invention relates generally to management of intellectual property (“IP”) rights, and in particularly to a technique for handling multiple IP right identifiers of an IP right across multiple parties or users.
IP rights are important assets for a company and therefore efficient management of IP rights is critical to success of the company. As a company grows, they create multiple IP rights in the form of patents, trademarks, designs, and so forth that need to be registered and maintained across different geographies. Typically, IP right identification codes such as patent application numbers have different formats around the world for the same IP right. There is no global standard for IP right identifiers associated with an IP right. Many national and/or commercial databases have errors due to the above limitation. IP law firms and/or IP service providers therefore face daunting task to handle such discrepancies manually, thereby reducing efficiency while incurring cost.
Current techniques to match IP right identifiers to the corresponding IP right with certain degree of automation include creating hundreds or thousands of business rules for each software application to handle disparate data from a Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”) and commercial databases. However, the creation of such rules for validating each unique case is time consuming and inefficient. Moreover, the multiple IP right identifiers may not conform to a standard even after application of such rules.
In recent years patent and trademark offices around the world have been working towards harmonization of the processing of patent related information by forming and implementing standards of information and data exchange. In that regard, open protocol standards have been implemented by the World Industrial Property Organization (“WIPO”), such as ST. 36, “Recommendation for the Processing of Patent Information Using XML (Extensible Markup Language). ST.36 is an application of the Internet standard for XML found at www.w3c.org.
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is not possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML. The standard ST.36 recommends using its version of XML applied to resources for filing, processing, publication, and exchange of “all types of patent information” according to the Handbook of Industrial Property Information and Documentation, Standard ST.36, ver. 1.2 (23 Nov. 2007). The WIPO handbook reports that ST.36 is based in large part on “Patent Cooperation Treaty, Administrative Instructions, Part 7, Annex F, Appendix I.” The purpose of ST. 36 “is to provide logical, system-independent structures for patent document processing, whether for text or image data.” The standard provides protocols for text of patent documents recorded as character coded data, whole pages of documents as images, and data within full-text documents that cannot be recorded as character coded data such as drawings, formulas, and some complex tables.
Another intellectual property protocol is used to exchange and communicate trademark information. The trademark extensible markup language (“TM-XML”) is used within industry, users, and governmental industrial property offices as an open standard for the exchange and processing of trademark documents and transaction records using XML. It was defined in June, 2003 by the Office of Harmonization in the Internal Market, and final version 1.0 was the basis for WIPO standard ST.66, “Recommendation for the Processing of Trademark Information using XML (Extensible Markup Language).” The ST.66 standard states that it is “ . . . aimed at providing guidance to national, regional and international authorities who, on the basis of national industrial property laws or international industrial property conventions, publish announcements, either on trademark applications or on registrations of trademarks.”
In the management of large volumes of patents and trademarks and the services related to procuring and maintaining those rights, large amounts of specialized data is retained in databases and transferred between various entities. For example, a corporation may use an intellectual property (“IP”) management software application to track and maintain its various patents and patent applications around the world. Data from this application could be exchanged with another IP management application that is used by an external legal service provider handling filing and docketing of patents and trademarks. Data could also be exchanged with various law firms handling the corporation's patent and trademark matters. Data could further be exchanged with an external legal service provider handling the payment of maintenance fees on the company's patents and trademarks around the world. A problem with such a network of applications and service providers is that each application or provider uses its own data from a specially formatted database making standardized data transfer between the various applications impossible.
Although ST.36 and TM-XML/ST.66 have improved communications between applicants and patent offices, it has been demonstrated as inadequate for a means of information transfer and management relating to procurement and maintenance of intellectual property by businesses and legal service providers. For example, a company owning thousands of patents may use one type of IP management application in-house, but it's outside legal counsel and legal services outsourcing providers may each use different IP management software which have different formats and protocols to store and transfer the data. In one example, three different IP databases are created and maintained: one by the company that is the owner of the patents, one by legal counsel at a law firm, and one by the legal services outsourcing provider. Each such IP database has requirements for patent and trademark data processing and transfer that are different than those available in ST. 36 and TM-XML. Further, each such database is typically formatted and processed differently thus preventing integration and seamless information transfer with another database and preventing the transfer of critical, specialized information in a standard way. Duplicate databases for information such as patent prosecution, docketing and processing, document attachments, and annuity fee payments are created.
It is therefore desirable to provide a technique so as to provide a set of standard IP right identifiers as well as the ability to standardize formatting of IP right identifiers according to a set of standard formatting rules regardless of the state or regional PTO in which the IP right originated from.